To what extent does Wharton encourage you to sympathize with Ethan? Support your ideas with detail from the nove
In answering the above questions, you must demonstrate that you understand the following:
1. Communicate a sensitive and informed personal response to literary text. (this is your
opinion/interpretation)
2. Understand the meanings of the text beyond the surface. (author’s purpose and implications)
3. Recognize ways in which the writer uses language, structure and form to create and shape meaning and
effects. (tone, point of view, pun, alliteration, malapropisms, imagery, other literary techniques, etc)
4. Knowledge of the text through the use of close reference to details and use of quotations.
5. Demonstrate an understanding of characters, relationships, situations and themes.
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That's allot of stuff to communicate in this forum but I can get you started. The narrator's first description of Ethan sounds pretty sad, "There was something bleak and unapproachable in his face....I took him for an old man and was surprised to hear that he was not more than fifty-two". We soon learn from Harmon Gow that Ethan had been that day since the "smash-up" twenty four years ago". I think it is this mood and tone that set us up for the Wharton's extended flashback. We learn that Ethan could have been something had he had a chance. He loved to learn. He devoured the narrator's issue of popular mechanics. He was like a child with a new comic book. Ethan's life however is one of indentured servitude. The text around his "captivity" is filled with a sad tragedy of a man who feels that he is worth nothing more. Check out this quote,
"All the long misery of his baffled past, of his youth of failure, hardship and vain effort, rose up in his soul in bitterness and seemed to take shape before him in the woman who at every turn had barred his way. She had taken everything else from him; and now she meant to take the one thing that made up for all the others."
The tragedy is that Ethan allows his wife to take his life away from him. Ethan's whole life seems defined by unrealised dreams and failures. Ethan does find a belief window of happiness but this too is plagued by his history of failure and pessimism. There is always a sense that Ethan could be just one step away from freedom. Just when we think it is going to happen, he embarks on a strange toboggan suicide pact. You just have to feel sorry for the guy.
That's allot of stuff to communicate in this forum but I can get you started. The narrator's first description of Ethan sounds pretty sad, "There was something bleak and unapproachable in his face....I took him for an old man and was surprised to hear that he was not more than fifty-two". We soon learn from Harmon Gow that Ethan had been that day since the "smash-up" twenty four years ago". I think it is this mood and tone that set us up for the Wharton's extended flashback. We learn that Ethan could have been something had he had a chance. He loved to learn. He devoured the narrator's issue of popular mechanics. He was like a child with a new comic book. Ethan's life however is one of indentured servitude. The text around his "captivity" is filled with a sad tragedy of a man who feels that he is worth nothing more. Check out this quote,
"All the long misery of his baffled past, of his youth of failure, hardship and vain effort, rose up in his soul in bitterness and seemed to take shape before him in the woman who at every turn had barred his way. She had taken everything else from him; and now she meant to take the one thing that made up for all the others."
The tragedy is that Ethan allows his wife to take his life away from him. Ethan's whole life seems defined by unrealised dreams and failures. Ethan does find a belief window of happiness but this too is plagued by his history of failure and pessimism. There is always a sense that Ethan could be just one step away from freedom. Just when we think it is going to happen, he embarks on a strange toboggan suicide pact. You just have to feel sorry for the guy.
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